The Sweasy Bunch

A week ago I made a post called "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" that mentioned in passing that terrific 1970's television show The Brady Bunch, a show that was loved by millions (mostly once it made its way into re-runs). What I didn't mention this is that--when I was a child--I did not see The Brady Bunch for the silly sitcom that it was.

In my mind, The Brady Bunch was a documentary...


My life growing up was a lot like The Brady Bunch. True, we never went to Hawaii, and we never were haunted by a bad luck tiki doll and kept in a cave by Vincent Price. Nor were any of my family ever lost in the Grand Canyon overnight and rescued by some Native Americans. And none of us kids ever performed original songs in matching polyester and spandex.

But in my many ways, my house WAS The Brady Bunch house. Here are just SOME of the similarities:

• Like Greg, Peter, and Bobby, I shared a bedroom until I was 12 years old, usually with my brothers Kelly and Donald (though at first with my older brother Tom). And like in the TV show, I had a regular bed while Kelly and Donald slept in bunk beds.
• In The Brady Bunch house Greg eventually moved out of the boys' room and up into the attic. In our house, it was the basement where the older kids slept, and when Tom went off to college when I was 12 years old I got to move into the basement. I never put up beads in the entry to my room, though, and I never cut a record as Johnny Bravo.
• My family went on yearly vacations just like the Brady family. As I said before, not to Hawaii or the Grand Canyon (though all of us DID go to King's Island at one time or another). Most years we went to Myrtle Beach. 
• We ate dinner together around a big table almost every night. 
• Most important of all, we had a relatively peaceful, quiet, and loving home. Just like the Brady's, we occasionally had disagreements and there were occasionally kids in trouble, but just like The Brady Bunch, those problems were for the most part episodic, and not a defining part of our lives.

Looking back now, I wonder how false The Brady Bunch must have felt to someone whose parents were fighting all of the time, or someone who was being sexually abused by a step-father, or someone whose mother was an alcoholic. To people in those situations, the show must have seemed SO stupid. 

I feel blessed to have thought that The Brady Bunch was realistic fiction.